Sand in Montreal: Chapters and Indigo

We're here! Me and the 200+ pounds of promotional material. Going through customs was a mixed bag. The first man,who looked at my passport, and me beneath his wiry silver frames, kept me at his booth a little while sizing up my business at the Just For Laughs Festival. After marking up my sheet, he dismissed me. But I didn’t want to go without a stamp in my passport, so he wrote more secret code on my sheet and sent me to a second room.

“He told me I could get my stamp in here,” I said to another man in prescription-wear. After five minutes of conversation, and him flipping through the book (snagged another fan), he sent me to yet another room. Here a lovely young woman asked me how many books I had, how much they were worth, and explained that normally I’d be taxed for all this since I was leaving it in the country. Even if it was “promotional.” She said she’d let me go this time because of all that’s going on for the festival, but that the next time I tried it, I’d probably get chaged.

Who cares, lets get to the pics.

Chapters on rue St. Catherine is great! They have a large travel section, and if I hadn’t been so hungry, I would’ve stayed longer to assess which books they had that I’d never heard of. I felt that they had a wider variety than the Borders/Barnes & Noble lot back in the States. They had several copies of Sand. As you can see they were already face out! No stealth shelf shifting needed here. A closer look shows you that TT Ireland is also getting good attention.

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Satisfied with Sand at Chapters, I went down the street to Place Trust Montreal-Indigo where Christine Michaud and I will be reading tonight. The first thing I saw, was that they had a good display on a prime shelf of new nonfiction books. This shelf is just to the right of the front door as you walk in. New nonfiction is always where I look first in a bookstore, and NEVER where I find any copies. So this made me happy.

Up the stairs was the travel section, so that’s where I went next. But I didn’t even need to go that far before seeing the next display! Indigo is definitely ready for the event. On a sidenote, there were books face out on their travel lit shelves, and two healthy displays of them on another table. The only tweaking needed was to go take three copies over to the Humor Essay section, where they were missing.

And on the way out, I saw that they had more of those white flyers at several registers, along with the post cards that we had sent for them to pass out (specialized to advertise the event). This was great to see, and even better that there were very few left.